Hopefully not all gold. Beyond that it isn't all that practical as an insitu building and fabrication material, sudden dumping of hundreds of tons of the stuff on the market would crash the price of it, making it less valuable and reducing the returns on the considerable investment needed.

Speaking of gold, probably should add Golden Spike to the list. I believe they have secondary or follow on plans for mining behind the initial tourism.

Hopefully not all gold. Beyond that it isn't all that practical as an insitu building and fabrication material, sudden dumping of hundreds of tons of the stuff on the market would crash the price of it, making it less valuable and reducing the returns on the considerable investment needed.

Speaking of gold, probably should add Golden Spike to the list. I believe they have secondary or follow on plans for mining behind the initial tourism.

Would the moon have huge metal deposits left by all those asteroid impacts?

As I see things, prospecting and mining in space still has huge 'problems' to overcome before anything worthwhile will come of it, and that means big initial investment. Of the three originally listed I personally think only DSI and Planetary Resources stand much chance of getting anywhere and that's primarily because they both have significant initial funding.

As has already been said, flooding the home market with precious metals won't help anything or anyone - it will have to be a controlled, measured and sensible feed that will keep the value at a level that will make the whole enterprise profitable. Where off-Earth mining will really come into its own though will be in providing resources for building stations and bases etc 'out there' without having to lift it from the Earth. It will however take considerable initial investment to develop the techniques and machines necessary to deal with the environment of space - different gravity situations, temperature extremes, vacuum etc. As and when these nuts are cracked though then things could seriously take-off, and I for one look forward to seeing it happen

_________________"Floodlit in the hazy distanceThe star of this unearthly showVenting vapours, like the breathOf a sleeping white dragon"

Well considering the fact that it takes money in order to get this kind of thing off the ground in the first place I have to say that's a pretty short-sighted approach. It's not about liking money, it's about the fact that you can't get anything done in the space industry without it. We don't live in a Star Trek universe where things are done unilaterally just because everyone knows they're the right thing to do for all mankind - we live in a driven economy, and in order to get the investment to design and build this stuff you need to show someone/your investors that there is going to be a profit at some point. The money is just a means to an end - that's a fact of life.

_________________"Floodlit in the hazy distanceThe star of this unearthly showVenting vapours, like the breathOf a sleeping white dragon"

Flooding the market with platinum group metals and bringing their price down wouldn't necessarily mean that you won't make a profit. You could still make a killing, especially if you put all terrrestrial mining out of business.

That would not be wise. Vested interests, socioeconomic impact, the whole secondary effects ball of wax.

Damn it.

Well at least we can be sure that will never happen because it would require the sudden appearance and application of technologies that would allow us to bring millions of tons of materials back every year.

Anyway:

Is anybody here involved with any hackerspace, and if so, is your hackerspace thinking of getting involved with SpaceGAMBIT?

I hope that they all succeed as we are going to need a few companies to rally behind and get the private space economy racing. The 3D printing developers should get the tech ready for space because that is where I would put them to good use. I can see printed habitats being all the rage for our grandkids.

Space finance needs to underwrite the cost of resource extracted from the total worth of the asteroid.